It’s been three months to the day that the earthquake happened in Haiti. Wait…don’t stop reading! I know that at this point in time you’re probably sick of hearing about Haiti. That sounds harsh, but I know that there’s a desensitization that happens after any disaster like this. You see it in the news and you feel it’s awful, but after a while it just becomes another thing that happened. It stops being on TV every day, you don’t see the images of people being pulled from the rubble or walking-wounded and so you assume it’s not an emergency anymore. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
I work for the American Refugee Committee and I can honestly say that this is the first job I’ve ever had where I’ve really connected with the type of work I’m doing. I’ve loved the practical sides of all my other jobs, but with this one, I find the work itself meaningful. That’s hard to find.
So since January, every working hour has been focused on Haiti. We had a team on the ground within 48 hours of the quake who immediately began to identify places where people were congregating and setting up makeshift settlements. After an earthquake, this will be any patch of open ground – a football field, park squares, in the middle of the street even. ARC is one of a handful of organizations which do camp management; many other NGO’s specialize in one service: shelter; food distribution; sanitation etc. So we found a place called Terrain D’Acra, which is actually a toxic waste dump in the grounds of a factory. This factory has been dumping its rubbish there for the past twenty years, and now people are living on top of it. Children were playing in it. You can see in photos that there are layers of rubbish packed into the ground.
So we began to manage the camp. This means we provided tents and tarps, we set up a clinic with doctors and nurses both from the US and Haiti, we cleared a space that is safe for children to play each day (child friendly spaces) and recruited Haitian teachers to begin activities with them. We partner with other organizations to get food and water distributions delivered.
Not to blow our own trumpet, but that’s no mean feat. How would you go about recruiting Haitian teachers and explaining to parents in the camp that we were beginning classes and get them to trust you with their children when you don’t speak Creole? Our ‘clinic’ was set up by putting a chair down in the middle of the camp with a doctor in it and announcing that there was a clinic. That doctor saw 190 patients in the first day and we built tents around him. We also now have nurses which go tent-to-tent in the afternoons to visit those who are too badly injured to walk to the doctor. As you can imagine, after an earthquake, many people suffer ‘crush injuries’ and amputations have to be performed before infection can spread. Most of this is done with no anaesthetic in the first few weeks, as hospitals run out of supplies and aid cannot get into the country and be distributed quickly enough.
I’m proud of everything we have achieved, both here at Terrain D’Acra and at Camp Hope in Fonds Parisien, where we have a convalescence clinic for people who are treated at a nearby medical facility just across the border in the Dominican Republic. But now the rains are coming. Hurricanes and floods will happen. We have 10,000 people in our camp at Terrain D’Acra and we managed to provide each family with a tent for now, and we received a grant from USAID to build a transitional shelter for those families. A transitional shelter is 16x12ft, constructed of termite and rot-resistant wood, with plywood and plastic walls and a sheet metal roof. It is designed to last three years, and will withstand earthquakes and category 1 hurricanes…so significantly better than a tent, I think you’ll agree.
However, we were informed recently by IOM (International Organization for Migration) that we are also responsible for an additional 15,000 people who live on the outskirts of our camp who currently do not have any shelter but the scavenged pieces of wood, corrugated tin and plastic which they pulled from the rubble. When the hurricanes come along, these pieces will become projectiles, injuring people. Rains will spread disease as rats and mosquitoes flourish. Sewage will be spread as the hundreds of thousands of people living outside the handful of managed camps – where there are basic latrines or pit toilets – have no designated area to go to the bathroom. This sewage will be washed through the city.
You may be reading this and thinking ‘But I already donated!’ or you may even be reading it and thinking that ‘the streets of Haiti must surely be paved with gold by now’, or that donations don’t actually get through to the people who need them, that they are tied up in bureaucracy within NGO’s and the Haitian government. I don’t profess to be an expert on any other agencies; I can’t tell you how much of their money goes where. But I do know what we do at the American Refugee Committee, and I can tell you that every penny that we have invested in Haiti until a week or so ago, when we got the USAID money through, came from private donations. Everything we had been able to establish was funded by donations from people just like you. That money is running out pretty fast. We spend 89 cents of every dollar directly helping people who have lost everything to take back control of their lives, and we receive an ‘A’ rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy.
On a human level, it can difficult to comprehend the situation in Haiti. I certainly can’t visualize 230,000 people dying. That’s Wembley Stadium filled to capacity two and a half times over. Or for my Minnesotan friends, the new Twins stadium filled almost 6 times…and then obliterated. I find it easier to deal with individuals. Many of my good friends have recently given birth or become pregnant, some for the first time. How would it feel to be a mother to a new born baby that you couldn’t protect from the rain, or perhaps you couldn’t breastfeed because you weren’t getting enough nutrition yourself? That was the case recently at one of our clinics. Put yourself in the position of a man who has lost his home, his job, and had a limb amputated and can no longer provide for his family. On the most basic level, the psychological impact of this kind of trauma can be devastating. So yes, perhaps you have donated - and that’s fantastic – but the scale of the disaster is such that we can’t even comprehend, and I would encourage you to remember that a small donation on a regular basis can actually provide the most vital services for people in Haiti, or in any of the other seven countries where we work.
If there’s one thing we don’t do, it’s handouts. We make every effort to get people back to being self-sufficient, whether that means providing a small business loan (around $50) to set up a market stall, or buying tools to give people the means to construct their own shelter, or donating seeds which can then be planted to provide both food and a source of income. Haitians are desperate to get back to work and rebuild their communities and get back to some kind of normality. We are establishing twelve carpentry teams to construct transitional shelters for the additional families in Port-au-Prince and I have begun a fundraising page on Firstgiving to make just one of those shelters a reality for one family.
http://www.firstgiving.com/hayleywambsganss
This is a small but achievable goal and can actually make a huge difference. It costs just $1,000 to build a shelter that will house a family of five for three years. I will be updating my page with news of our progress and any small amount contributed would be greatly appreciated! You can easily set up your own page too – just follow the link on my page that says “I want to raise money too!” and you can set up your own page in just a few minutes. I appreciate you reading this through to the end, as I know it’s not my most fun blog post, and I wasn’t trying to be preachy, I just want you to understand that what we choose to do in our lives can have huge consequences for other people and just a small action on your part, like donating $10 (the equivalent of a bottle of wine or two magazines!) can put a shovel in the hands of someone in Haiti and get them started on building their house.
If you'd like to know more about what the American Refugee Committee is doing in Haiti and across the world, please visit www.ARCrelief.org
All photos courtesy of Miguel Sampa.
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